Category Archives: Conference

On 3-5 June, a colourful group of researchers from all over the world gathered in The Hague for our conference Practices of Reading and Writing, a conference organized by the research team of the NWO-VIDI project Marginal Scholarship.

The central theme of the conference conference was practices of reading and writing in the marginal and interlinear spaces of early medieval books, on fly leaves and inserted slips; in other words, the space around ‘main’ texts in which we can observe the response of readers. Although the theme itself may seem ‘marginal’ at first sight, the enthusiastic response of many colleagues, both young and old, showed a certain momentum for the topic, which is certainly due to a massive movement of digitizing manuscript collections. For the first time, a broad audience of researchers can, in fact, observe and analyse marginal activity in a wide set of manuscripts from all over Europe.

Moreover, the margin, as Erik Kwakkel emphasized in his lecture, is half the book: the average space around a writing block is about 50%. And in this ‘white’ space, readers and writers left many traces, witnessing techniques of structuring text, excerpting text, making text memorable, etceteral. We can find references to other authorities, explanations about the meaning of a text and its interpretation. We can find techniques to correct text, to fill in missing bits, to add variant readings and to compare different versions, to criticize and even denounce or censure text.

Margins are thus a mirror in which we can observe how books and texts functioned in the lives of people. They show us humanity and humor. Some marginal annotations show an astonishingly high level of interaction with text, an unexpected familiarity with ancient learning and an interest in the most abstract subjects. Others, on the other hand, are incomprehensibly slow, dumb-witted and contradictory.

In three days, a rich array of papers was delivered out of all corners of European book-culture: from late-antique Roman law (Simon Corcoran) to 13th-century Franciscan practices of organizing a text into theological categories (Alberto Cevolini).

To mention just a few examples of the many interesting papers: David Ganz opened the conference with an analysis of annotating practices in Amiens, and confronted them with those found in Corbie (described in his famous book Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance). Anna Bellettini showed us how Spanish fugitives were active in Italy, with their own characteristic practices of writing and annotating. Some papers showed us books that were made and used by individual scholars, who tailored them just for their own specific purposes and who traveled with their personal books through Europe (Giorgia Vocino, Ad van Els). The practice of editing and correcting texts was illustrated in a number of papers (Erik Kwakkel, Justin Stover), as well as the ways in which text-critical voices were matched with content-critical ones, who used critical signs, prefaces and even illustrations (Warren Pezé, Irene van Renswoude, Patrizia Carmassi).

Pádraic Moran ended with a lecture in which we left Europe, and traveled to Asia, where medieval Japanese readers struggled to make sense of their Chinese Buddhist texts.

The traces left by readers and writers in margins and on flyleaves, turned out to be an exceptionally rich source for the understanding and interpretation of our own literary cultures. They offer stepping stones for new and innovating research.

This is a conference on the subject of books, practices of writing, reading, copying and studying in the early middle ages. It is organized by the research project ‘Marginal Scholarship: The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800 – c. 1000)’, which seeks to map the phenomenon of writing in the blank space of manuscripts (in the margin, in between the lines, on fly-leaves or inserted leaves) in the early middle ages, in order to gain a better understanding of how books and texts were used in that period. In essence, we aim to understand the intellectual practices of the period as reflected by the manuscripts and to re-evaluate both how traditional the period was, and how innovative. Furthermore, we hope to explore how the developments of the culture of writing in this period led to developments in later periods, and also how they compare to those in other cultures, such as the world of Late Antiquity. Guest of honour at the conference is David Ganz, who, with his work on Corbie in the Carolingian renaissance and on manuscripts and book production in that time, set a standard from which we greatly profited.

The following questions and themes will be addressed in the sessions:

1. Practices of annotating

Who were allowed to make annotations in manuscripts? What can we learn about the hierarchical organization of the writing process in monastic or cathedral environments, and are there ways to say something about the status of scribes and/or scholars working in manuscript margins?

Annotating practices reflect many different functionalities of the appropriation of text: they can, for example, reflect a process of text comparison and textual criticism; they can have the aim to gather information in order to facilitate the composition of a new text; they can offer guidance to the reader, either in the sense of offering explanation or interpretation, or in the sense of warning the reader and delivering criticism; they can engage in a discussion with the author of the text, or with another annotator, or create stepping stones from one text to others, in order to broaden the reading of the text by offering new and different opinions. We would like to discuss these and other functionalities, and replace the mono-dimensional ‘annotated book = school book’ with a richer and more accurate model of interpretation.

2. The profile of annotating practices

Can we see patterns in the relationship between textual genres and the kind of marginal activity encountered in the margin? Were certain textual genres treated differently than others? For example, do theological texts invite other types of critical reflection than scientific texts or historical texts? Are there genres with ‘empty’ margins, and what would be the reason for that?

Can we distinguish sets of annotating practices which are specific to certain intellectual centres or groups of scholars? Can we distinguish individual practices even, which allow us to identify the scholar who worked in the manuscript? It has been argued, for example, that the group around Florus of Lyon had a very particular set of signs to mark patristic texts, in order to prepare florilegia of patristic quotations on certain subjects. Are there other examples of such private practices, and what happened to them after the death of the scholar(s) at their centre?

Some annotating practices are particular to a certain period in history. Tironian notes, for example, seem to have been used in a specific time and space for marginal comments, and are rarely found outside that period. The Nota sign gets company in the shape of a pointing hand at a certain moment in time, is perhaps even replaced by it. Could we mark annotation practices on a chronological scale, just as we can with letter shapes or other physical features of manuscripts?

3. Cultures of writing

Manuscripts, scholars and books travelled, and thus the culture of writing is a dynamic and ever evolving field. Can we map the circles of influence from one scholar, or one school to the next through the eyes of manuscripts? Can we trace specific practices of annotating or writing in general through history, and follow their historical development? And do these practices offer us insight into the intellectual networks of the time? What would be good strategies to map the dynamics of the lives of manuscripts, both in the sense of their actual travels, and in the sense of their changing contents?

A selection of the papers from the conference will be collected in an edited volume, to be published in 2016.

The deadline for sending in proposals for this conference has closed. If you are interested in attending the conference, please send us an email (MarginalScholarship@gmail.com) before 1 May 2015. Don’t wait until the last minute: the capacity of our conference room is limited, and we will accept those who are interested in the order of their registration. You will hear back from us before 15 May 2015 whether your registration has been accepted. Non-presenting participants will be asked to pay a small fee per day, to cover the costs of their lunches and drinks.